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Home > Sangre Celestial > Huntington Beach grapples with white supremacist history
Podcast: Sangre Celestial
Episode:

Huntington Beach grapples with white supremacist history
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-09-17 19:00:00
Description: Members of the white nationalist organization Patriot Front chanted and held signs declaring “white men fight back” while marching through Huntington Beach on Saturday during a vigil for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. White supremacist groups have disrupted other memorials in Huntington Beach since Kirk’s assassination a week ago. The weekend’s incidents are a reminder of the city's uncomfortable, not-so-distant past when it comes to white supremacist activity, according to The LA Times’ Hannah Fry. Fry tells KCRW that local Republican groups organized the recent vigils to give people an outlet to mourn Kirk, but white nationalist groups crashed those events, and it’s unclear where they’re from. Huntington Beach City Council Member Butch Twining attended Wednesday’s vigil hours after Kirk’s death, and he was angry about white supremacists’ presence there, Fry reports. “He said that they really disrupted what was supposed to be a peaceful event, and he very much condemned them being in Huntington Beach. He reiterated that this is not what Huntington Beach is about. And it's something that over the years covering that city, I've heard again and again from officials who are really trying to distance themselves from the city’s ugly history.” Twining’s presence at the vigil gained traction on social media, and people assumed he was participating in the white supremacist activity there, but he denies that and says he immediately left when he heard them chanting, Fry reports. She recalls that in the mid-1980s, Downtown Huntington Beach was a gathering place for young white supremacists, many of whom had swastika tattoos. Then in 1994, she adds, a white supremacist fatally shot a 44-year-old Black man outside a McDonald’s, and was later charged with attempted murder of two Latino men in a shooting that happened weeks earlier. By the mid-1990s, city officials tried to stop the violence by creating a human relations task force that celebrated cultural diversity, and created a declaration on human dignity. “That was the official pushback on hate crimes, saying, ‘This is not what's happening in our city, we're going to fight against this.’ So over the years, they've done a lot to really distance themselves, but it has kept popping up.” But last year, Huntington Beach rewrote its decades-old human dignity resolution to remove any mention of intolerance of hate crimes. “It's something I hear from residents again and again … ‘if we are against this, and if we are patently against this, and want people to know, why did we take that out?’ … I think it's something that the city is grappling with,” Fry says.
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